Diezmo (2 page)

“But Bastrop is larger,” Green said. “And if we
don't
get forty, then we have to go on up to Bastrop anyway, losing two extra days.”

They debated some more, out of earshot of their men, and finally decided by Fisher's choosing one of two twigs from Green's fist. The short twig meant they would take the near path to LaGrange, while the longer twig meant traveling directly to Bastrop, bypassing LaGrange. The men, women, and children—the farmers and teachers, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters—slept peacefully in Bastrop, never knowing, never being asked to die, spared, as I would be—but without the choice and the challenge.

 

In LaGrange, Fisher and Green secured forty-two volunteers. They came from a mix of society: the unschooled and the well educated, the poor and the elite, the sons of ne'er-do-wells, of politicians, of farmers, clerks, and grocers. What burned brightest in us all was a love of the land, with its wild pecan groves and deer and turkey, and the fertile river bottom and endless timber and grasslands.

Surely we would not have had so many wars, had our land not been so beloved—fighting the Indians to the west, and Mexico to the south, as the flow of Appalachian emigrants continued to filter down from out of the highlands.

What our town was like then was the calm in the eye of a storm. We lived in bucolic idyll, and knew it; each morning, dawn's rising found us already out in the fields, working. And paradoxically, it was the pastoral existence, this peace within the whirlwind, that compelled many of us to leave the calm and venture out into the storm. Looking back, I can see clearly the irony and wrong-headedness of it, but back then it seemed to make perfect sense: almost as if such decisions and such notions had been foreordained.

My own family were farmers, Gores and Lowrys from Tennessee, whose ancestors had come down from Wales, pausing for a generation in County Cork before traveling across the Atlantic. Like the other forty-one new recruits, I told my parents goodbye and said that our commanders promised we would be back in two weeks, or three at the most.

We gathered our weapons—a rifle or a pistol, or both—and ammunition, with which we were never wasteful, and packed a lunch, and rode out that afternoon.

Not all of us were young. The eldest was Claudius Toops, a blacksmith of sixty, who enlisted with his son Buster, who was forty, and Buster's own son Andrew, who was twenty. But regardless of rank or age or station in life, that first evening, with the mass of us camped on the banks of the Brazos, we were all in high spirits, conjoined in a new brotherhood.

In the days before our march, the newspapers had been quoting Texas's president, Sam Houston, as saying that regrettably there was no budget for arming militias and bands of patriots such as ours—that “the government will promise nothing but the authority to march, and will furnish such supplies of ammunition as may be needed for the campaign. Volunteers must look to the Valley of the Rio Grande for remuneration,” he told reporters, and surely he meant from the other side of the river—the Mexican side. “Our government promises to claim no portion of the spoils,” he told the press; “they will be divided among the victors.” He finished with one caveat: “The flag of Texas will accompany any such expedition.”

And camped there on the Brazos that first night, Captain Green produced with a flourish a tattered paper that he said was our personal marching orders from President Houston himself. The letter was dated October third of that year and addressed not the bandits whom Green and Fisher said we would be chasing, but Mexico's General Woll's surprising attack (with two thousand men) on the southern outpost of San Antonio.

In those early days of the march, bur fiddles had not yet been abandoned; a few of the recruits had shoved them into their saddlebags or rode with them tied to their saddles, bouncing and sometimes squealing with a single stray note. And that night, as Green produced and then began to read from his letter, they fell silent, and we listened as intently as if he were President Houston himself.

“Captain Green, my fellow patriot,” he read. “You will proceed to the most eligible point on the southwestern frontier of Texas, concentrate with the force now under the command, all troops who may submit to your order, and if you can advance with the prospect of success, into the enemy's territory, you will do so at once. You will receive no troops into your command but such as those who will swear to march across the Rio Grande under your orders, if required by you to do so. If you cross the Rio Grande, you must suffer no surprise, but be always on the alert.

“In battle, let the enemy feel the fierceness of just resentment and retribution. You alone will be held responsible to the government, and sustained by its resources.

“I have the honor to be, Your Obedient Servant, Sam Houston.”

Again and again on the campaign, Green would read this letter to us, and he always paused near the end. It was not until much later in the campaign that I found out he had been skipping a sentence.

“You will be controlled by only the most civilized warfare,” the sentence read, “and you will find great advantage of exercising great humanity toward the common people.”

These words were from a man who had been kicked out of Tennessee for alleged marital scandals, stripped from the U.S. Senate for alcoholism, and had gone to live with the Indians in east Texas before it was a nation; who had recovered, in that wilderness, and who had gone on to become a chief of the Cherokees, and then the president of a new nation. It was just one sentence, and perhaps a small one—twenty-four words—but in the end, it was all the difference between what was intended and what was done.

We rode south, led by Green and Fisher, the two sometimes glancing at each other but usually staring straight ahead, as if afraid some of us might look back toward home and change our minds. But in the beginning, as we rode south, searching for mysterious bandits, infidels against the republic, we were certain we would win. It was a feeling like the Holy Spirit descending. Your hands and feet tingle. You feel that all is predestined and you have prepared for glory. You cannot imagine loss or the anonymity brought by time.

We secured beef from the ranches and farms we passed. Everything we saw was ours—ours to defend, and then ours to possess. Shepherd and I shared a tent with two boys from Elgin and Navasota. Each night we cleaned our weapons and sharpened our swords. The sound of the steel seemed like the sound of judgment itself, and we were overcome with wonder and relief at having been chosen. We would lead remarkable lives. We had been rescued.

2

W
E SEETHED WITH
the gold light within us, rode across burnished plains gilded in November light, with the dead dry grasses rustling in the north wind. With the Comanches up north hunting buffalo and the Mexicans on the run back behind their border, the country was ours. It was wonderful to see new country, and more wonderful to be in possession of it: to gain ownership of it merely by the act of looking.

Green and Fisher were our captains, but among us were other natural leaders. Bigfoot Wallace, six feet four inches tall and gaunt as a whippet, named for his size-sixteen boots, had been a Texas Ranger—never an officer, because of his uncivilized ways, but a learned soldier nonetheless, in every way the equal of either of our captains and in many ways their superior. He drew a goodly number of men about him at the campfire each night to hear tales of his exploits from past campaigns. He seemed to be a peaceable giant, though it was also said that he had never gone more than a week in his life without engaging in some sort of battle, and it seemed to me, in those first days, that I could see that change beginning to come over him—an abiding and overarching good humor and generosity becoming slightly more dulled with each passing evening. An anxiety rose in him as day after day passed by without war.

Also prominent within our regiment was the Scotsman Ewen Cameron, who was as dumb as a box of rocks. His strength was so prodigious as to seem supernatural, and like Wallace, he was anxious when in the absence of war. He was less cunning than Wallace, and his anxiety was fed by his fervor. He was a soldier of the Lord, eager to judge and punish, and, in his simplicity, desperate.

And like Bigfoot Wallace, Cameron too had scores of soldiers who gathered around him each evening. And among us was a third group, Lieutenant Somervell's, composed of those who seemed destined to become the politicians and leaders of the republic.

Lieutenant Somervell was another former Texas Ranger—though unlike Wallace, who had been a mere scout, he was a military man through and through. Why Green and Fisher had been assigned leadership, while Somervell, with his precise and military bearing, his caution and dignity, seemed only a participant on the expedition was unclear. I supposed Somervell and others like him could not be kept from war, whether or not their qualities were fully recognized.

We settled into three distinct camps: Fisher's marauders, Green's yeoman nondescripts, and Somervell's dandies. Each man had a chance to tell the others his story if he was fortunate to have one worth telling, though there were many of us who were silent.

For my part, what to tell these rough and angry men: that I was a farmer and a fisherman?

By six short years, the youngest among us had missed the Alamo, and San Jacinto, and the birth of a nation. There was none among us who did not still feel the righteous pride of the victory at San Jacinto, or the pride of the courage and resolve we heard had been displayed at the Alamo during those thirteen days of siege.

John Alexander—no relation to me—had been traveling with Green for weeks, always, it seemed, mere hours behind the enemy. It was Green's fire at which Shepherd and I usually sat, and although John Alexander was too reticent to speak up at the evening storytelling sessions, we learned from him that some days they had been so close to the enemy that coals from their cooking fires had still been glowing and the horse turds in their makeshift corrals still so warm as to be drawing gnats and flies.

He had learned much in the short time he'd spent with Green, he said, but he was growing frustrated, afraid we would never find or catch up to the enemy.

“Those fires,” Shepherd asked him, “how did you know they were from the Mexicans?”

John Alexander looked confused as he considered it, and searched for an answer. “Because Captain Green said they were,” he said finally.

There were so many others like John Alexander who feared we would never find the enemy, would never engage in combat—that the bandits had already crossed back over the border, and that peace, like a curse, was settling in. But Fisher, Green, and Somervell told us not to worry, there would be more war.

Sitting around Green's fire, we could hear the singing around Somervell's fire, could see the flame-backed silhouettes of men dancing and cheering. His military men were cut from a different cloth than were we recruits and Fisher's hard cases, but during our journey our differences began to fade, even as our varied desires and motivations began to divide us.

We drifted south, finding occasional traces of the bandits—a whisper in one village, the tale of a pilfered cow in another, the rumor of a stolen ferry, the sound of gunfire, the remains of a large campfire, three days old. I was filled with unease, the sense of having made a poor choice, and I think Shepherd felt it as well. From time to time he looked questioningly over at me.

The sky above us was huge. The tall drying grass of late autumn and early winter rustled before us in waves. The sight of the wind moving across land balanced my unease. I stared forward across the plains and avoided Fisher's and Green's eyes—especially Fisher's. Did they ever look back at their five hundred and consider which ones, or how many, might not return?

 

We basked in the attentions of the farmers and ranchers. We were given bushels of bread and nuts, chickens and calves, fruits and vegetables. The farther we traveled, the more accustomed we became to such treatment, so that when we did not receive it, there was resentment. Fisher's men, in particular, were quick to take offense, grumbling that they were risking their lives for ungrateful sodbusters and hayseeds, and even some of Somervell's men, despite the lieutenant's obvious displeasure, grew more and more like marauders. It was an astonishment to me how much we required to eat, and the swath we cut, with well over three hundred horses—twelve hundred hooves—cutting our way through the brush, raising sand and dust and eating everything in sight.

Otto Williams was the first man I saw take something without the formality of asking. One day he was near the lead of our ranks as we rode into a small settlement north of Laredo, supposedly looking for the bandits but actually looking for food. It took so much to keep us going that we were less like a military expedition than a very large and extended hunting trip. From the very beginning, I noticed that there were some who were not so much interested in the search for bandits as they were simply in the hunting and the war.

Otto Williams was one of these. As we rode into the little settlement, the townspeople spread to either side of the road and held their possessions close to them: a basket of poor-looking chickens, a sack of flour over each shoulder, a goat on a rope—it was midmorning on a market day—and although they were simply going about their business, the impression it gave, or could have given, I suppose, to a man like Otto Williams, was that these people were coming out to the street to give us these things, that a feast was being prepared in our honor.

And for the first time, without bartering or even asking, Otto Williams simply rode over to a villager who had a young bull tethered to a heavy rope—the bull nearly as large as the old man, whose hair was completely silver—and after drawing his sword from his saddle, Otto Williams brought it down quickly and forcefully. Just as he did so, another rider shifted in front of me, and I thought Otto Williams was only severing the rope that bound the animal, but then I saw that he had struck the animal itself, his razor-sharp sword passing halfway through the animal's neck. The red blade lifted again, bright in the sun, without a sound, and the old man fell back in terror while Williams struck a second and third time before the head—still attached to its halter—fell to the dusty ground, and the animal knelt and fell over.